


Ballad of the Giants: Opening Chord

by raisedbymoogles



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Transformers Generation One
Genre: AU, Crossover, Gen, baby nerd Zelda, implied Link, one of seven million More Than Meets The Eye retellings probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 09:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14186220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raisedbymoogles/pseuds/raisedbymoogles
Summary: When Zelda rides out to see the ten-thousand-year-old relic currently being excavated on the edge of Rito territory, she discovers something beyond her wildest imaginings.





	Ballad of the Giants: Opening Chord

When the messenger came from the Rito watchmen that they’d found an ancient artifact buried in a 10,000-year-old strata uncovered by the recent earthquake, fifteen-year-old Princess Zelda begged to go with the delegation and see it for herself. Her father forbade it. “You are to travel to Akkala in the morning,” he scolded her. “Focus on your prayers to the Spring of Power. That is your duty, daughter.”

Zelda lowered her head. In the morning, her father watched a blonde-haired figure ride out with the Akkala delegation, and nodded - as it should be. He did not see the helmeted soldier that rode with the delegation to Tabantha and the Rito.

They discovered Zelda the first time the party was attacked by Moblins, of course; Zelda was a fair archer but no swordswoman that could pass for a Hylian guard. But by then they were closer to their destination than to Hyrule Castle and there was a strange sense of urgency over all of them these days. Monsters were growing bolder and more numerous, and the earthquake that had uncovered this mysterious artifact had seemed to create its own fault lines. The signs were growing unignoreable. So Zelda was assigned a guard, a messenger was sent back to Hyrule Castle - Zelda winced at that - and the party continued northwest.

(She wondered if the boy she’d convinced ( _tricked_ ) to take her place was faring as well. Well, Hylia seemed to have Her hand on him already - perhaps he would succeed where she was already beginning to suspect she’d failed.)

It wasn’t her first time in Tabantha, and the Rito of course made much of her, but Zelda’s heart was elsewhere than the songstresses and archers of Rito Village. When she was conducted to the excavation sight, she was entranced, her hands on her horse’s reins so tight that the beast pranced nervously under her. “It’s a ship,” came to her lips unbidden.

Their guide glanced aside at her, his crest slicked back doubtfully. “Not like any ship I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Your Highness.”

But it _was._ Zelda could see it in its sleekness of form, stretched wide like a Rito’s wings to catch the slightest updraft, even if it was far too _big_ to ever get off the ground by any power Zelda knew. “And it’s been here ten thousand years,” she marveled, following their guide and the soldiers closer. “Has anyone been inside?” she asked, eyeing the opening she could see leading into the darkened interior of the ship.

“No, your Highness. We can’t guarantee it’s safe,” the excavation master answered. This man was a Sheikah, not a Rito, and from the way he watched her out of the corner of his eye he was far more wary of the teenage princess than the Rito were. Well, that was all right. Zelda steered the conversation elsewhere, and bided her time.

*

She had a torch, but didn’t dare to light it until she was shrouded in the darkness of the ship’s interior. Breathing hard from mingled exertion and excitement, Zelda seized her burning torch in shaking hands and crept forward, already rehearsing what she’d write in her report. _I entered the ship - no, the structure, ‘ship’ is unconfirmed - and continued down a long, unmarked hallway. The hallway split off at regular intervals, suggesting not only intelligence but intention in its design. At the end of the hallway was a large chamber-_ Zelda paused at the entrance, trying to make the shapes the torchlight revealed to her make sense. Enormous blocky metal forms, towering over her as she crossed the threshold, and more on the ground in no clear pattern she could discern. Only when she nearly tripped over a form like a hand did she understand. The hand was large enough to cradle her whole body, and her eyes followed the attached arm up to a broad shoulder and a shattered chest and a face featureless below the eyes as though a man wearing a mask.

Now Zelda really did fall over. _Metal men! Metal giants!_

Most of them could have dwarfed a Hinox. Even the smallest among them would have rivaled even the tallest Gorons in height. And - though she couldn’t be sure - she thought the objects some of them clutched in their still hands had the look of weapons. A war party, then? What were they fighting?

“Did the Calamity threaten you too, ten thousand years ago?” she asked softly, gazing up into the face of the masked giant. He must have been a mighty warrior, all broad and sturdy, but something in what she could see of his face spoke of _gentleness._

…that was too unscientific to make it into a report, so Zelda tucked that thought away and continued her explorations. The towering block forms she thought were _chairs,_ some of them even remaining occupied by slumped giant forms. Zelda climbed into one of them and peered over the flat structure facing it, torch held high. Was it a writing desk, a podium…? There were strange structures all over the face of it, accompanied by regular markings that could only be writing, though it didn’t resemble any written language she knew. “If only I could read this, she murmured, running her fingertips over the script. It was slightly raised, stamped into the metal. “Oh!”

Zelda jerked away as static leaped between her and the metal, stinging her fingers. “Teach me to touch without observing proper protocols,” she commented into the still air, and only then realized the air was no longer so still. It hummed, and the hum was coming from the desk in front of her, and then it was coming from all around her. Zelda cried out and leaped out of the enormous chair, hiding behind it as a light snapped on overhead, searing her eyes with the brightness of the sun. It fell directly upon the broken chest of the masked giant. As Zelda watched from behind the chair, the giant’s injuries ran together and disappeared as if they had never been. The giant began to stir, enormous hands curling against the metal floor, a low rumble starting up within him.

Just as abruptly as it had appeared, the light disappeared. Zelda was plunged into darkness so thick it seemed to stop her breath. Somehow she hadn’t noticed her torch had gone out. She hid behind the chair again, heart thrashing against her ribcage like a caged bird, and listened to the metal-on-metal scrapes and groans as the giant rose to his feet.

_What have I done? What have I unleashed?_

Blue light swept over her. Helplessly, Zelda looked up - and was caught in the gaze of the masked giant, as steady and strong as he had been sleeping and vulnerable a moment ago, his eyes shining forth with an unearthly blue glow. As they stared at one another, Zelda felt quite certain she was about to die, and her father would be terribly angry with her, and _she hadn’t even begun her research yet._

The great head tilted. Slowly, excruciatingly carefully, the metal man knelt, held out a hand palm-up to her with a series of rumble-clicks that Zelda even in her fright couldn’t help but connect with the script she’d seen and touched. “Are - are you speaking to me?” she asked, and the metal man clicked at her again. “I - I am Princess Zelda of Hyrule. Do you know where you are? We found your structure - your ship - in a geological strata after an earthquake. It looks to be about ten thousand years old. Are - are you that old? Have you been here all this time?”

Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She chattered, with no indication her metal man understood, until her throat failed with exhaustion and her body trembled with hunger and excitement rather than terror, until the metal man had absorbed every word of hers he could get and finally understood enough to respond in kind.

“My name is Optimus Prime.”

**Author's Note:**

> This kind of fell out of my head at one in the morning. I make no promises you'll ever see more of it from me. (Who am I kidding, the next bit already has a title.)


End file.
